DAY OF LIBERATION - 8/9 MAY 2020 - DAY OF VICTORY

Even if the current restrictions do not make large public commemoration celebrations possible, the FIR and its member federations commit this historical date in the anti-fascist sense.

75 years ago, on May 8/9 1945, humanity experienced the final military crushing of German fascism. These dates mark the victory over the inhuman regime of Hitler fascism,

- which excluded, persecuted and imprisoned political opponents and dissenters,

- which murdered millions of people from a self-constructed race alone as Jews, as Sinti and Roma, as Slavs,

- which covered the states in Europe and even countries and peoples in other parts of the world with war, occupation and annihilation, with the aim of imperial hegemony and the destruction of the Soviet Union,

- which, in its cruel outcome, cost the lives of at least 55 million people.

Today in some countries of Europe the historical truth is denied, the liberators from the fascist barbarism are disregarded, the collaborators with the fascist occupant are honored as "freedom fighters". The scandalous declaration of the European Parliament on 19 September 2019 is a bad example, an ideological relapse into the worst period of the Cold War.

Against these forms of historical revisionism, we emphasize as FIR:

The fascist plans of world domination were stopped by the common activities of the anti-Hitler coalition. It was the members of the armed forces of the allies, above all the members of the Soviet army, who carried the main load of the war, which destroyed this threat also militarily.

It was the partisans and resistance fighters in all countries occupied by fascism, with the communists in the front rows, who gave their lives for the freedom of their homeland.

Part of this anti - Hitler - coalition were also German anti-fascists, who fought illegally in Germany, in the ranks of the partisans or together with the allied forces for the liberation of their own country.

We remember all those women and men who - often at the risk of their lives - made the liberation possible.

May 8/9, 1945 was the day of liberation and victory. It marks the beginning of a new policy in international relations. The community of action of all Nazi opponents created the basis for the founding of the United Nations and the establishment of the foundations of international law for the prosecution and conviction of the main war criminals in the Nuremberg Tribunal. These legal norms are still valid today, as the General Assembly of the United Nations has repeatedly confirmed.

Liberation and military victory are an obligation for our political action today together with the members of today's generations

- against war, imperial hegemony, state and non-state terrorism and their social roots.

We stand in the tradition of the "Oath of Buchenwald": "Extermination of Nazism with its roots, creation of a new world of peace and freedom". In this sense, the member organizations of FIR work today for the realization of comprehensive political and social human rights, for peace and democracy.